Police in Brazil have accused Pat Hickey of offering Ireland’s Olympics tickets to a banned British seller.
They’ve released emails sent by Pat Hickey in the run-up to Rio – including one in which he appears to give away all of Ireland’s tickets for the Olympic opening ceremony.
Police handling the case say the email correspondence between Hickey and the businessman Marcus Evans dates back to 2010, when Evans' firm THG Group was the OCI's official ticket partner.
Among those emails, however, are two messages from August 3rd - two days before the start of the Rio games.
In the first, Pat Hickey emails Marcus Evans offering him the use of some Irish tickets for Rio 2016 that were not wanted by Ireland's official ticket reseller Pro10.
In the second, Hickey confirms that he didn’t need ANY of Ireland’s allocated tickets for the opening or closing ceremonies – and told Evans he “could use them all”.
The development that Ireland still had tickets for the opening ceremony, just two days before it was due to take place, conflicts heavily with the account given to the families of Irish Olympians.
Grainne Adams, the mother of Olympic sailor Finn Lynch, says she had approached Pro10 back in May, seeking tickets for the Opening Ceremony - but was told, at that point, the tickets had sold out in January:
Hickey’s legal team have not yet responded to these developments, and his case remains caught in a backlog in Rio.
Dermot Henihan, the general secretary of the OCI, has been given his passport and cleared to return home after meeting with police yesterday.
Kevin Kilty, who was the head of the Irish team in Rio and the OCI’s treasurer, and the chief executive Stephen Martin, will meet with police today.
That leaves three other individuals who are still the subject of passport seizure orders within Brazil – the acting president Willie O’Brien, vice-president John Delaney, and Pat Hickey’s personal assistant Linda O’Reilly.
Sinead O’Carroll, news editor of TheJournal.ie, says police in Brazil are still keen to speak to those three – and are also seeking help from a minister, here at home:
